


Azure

by ShadowedSeas



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Mental Institutions, Self-Harm, implicit mental disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-11
Updated: 2012-08-11
Packaged: 2017-11-11 22:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/483804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowedSeas/pseuds/ShadowedSeas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short work based on color, and the things you miss when you have nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Azure

**Author's Note:**

> This is an odd little piece I did on a burst of irritation more than inspiration, but I think it came out all right. It came to me after a conversation with a friend who was taking a writing course at the time. I can't recall the specifics, but she was complaining about the lack of originality in the stories her classmates were writing. She must have given some examples (though I can't remember any of them) because I distinctly recall thinking, 'I can write something better than that right now,' and then proceeded to write this. 
> 
> I'm not quite sure what that says about my competitiveness or my mental state, but I like how it came out so I'll ignore the implications.

The room was a bland non-color. 

Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor all the same color. The kind of bland, painted sameness that was found in institutions and back hallways that no-one walked through. At some point or other someone must have made a committee who studied paint colors and found that color in general was too excitable, too emotional, so every building that had a lot of people in it was painted the same shade of bland.

The bland didn't bother him really, which he supposed proved the committee’s point, but he kind of missed blue.

He didn’t miss brown because his hair was long enough to hang in front of his eyes, sometimes shading them with a soft brown that reminded him of teddy bears. And he could always see his hands to remind himself of skin color.

He wondered what the name of his skin color was. He wasn’t really tan or pink or olive, and he had always thought olive was a green color until he met that girl near the sea who said her skin was an olive tone, and she wasn’t green. His skin had a kind of red flush to the color, like his arms were always slightly blushing. He didn’t think arms could blush. Did arms get embarrassed? But then there would be a time when they weren’t blushing, and they were always a little red. Except in the cold. When it got too cold they turned pale and almost white, but not really white. It was more like the bland wall color. He knew that because his pants and shirt were white. Pure, gleaming white. The kind of white you were afraid to touch because you might smudge it, and then it would turn dull and grey. But his clothes never seemed to smudge. Not when he slept, or moved, or ate the tan food on the tan tray. Not even when he slammed his fist into the wall and bright red dripped down the bland paint.

Then others had come, all dressed in green with clear needles full of liquids that burned and tingled. They held him with their different skin-colored hands as one used the needles. One was like him, with a skin color that had no name and arms that blushed. Another’s was like coffee. Not the kind with cream and sugar, but the dark kind that was as bitter as it was dark. The one who held the needles was like the olive girl who had talked to him before, at the sea.

The blue sea.

He missed that blue, glimmering and shining under the sun like jewels carelessly tossed. An endless blue that rolled and swayed. He missed blue. He wished for blue. Any blue. That blue would be best, but he wouldn’t mind sky blue or dark blue or that bright blue that came in crayon boxes where there were only eight colors.

He wasn’t sure that they made crayon boxes with just eight colors anymore. Now all the crayon boxes had dozens of colors like periwinkle, and salmon, and taupe. He didn’t really even know what taupe was. Was it reddish? Brown? Green? What was it even named after? He supposed it didn’t matter much. If the crayon makers wanted to name some color they came up with taupe, it was their decision. They were the ones who made the colors after all. 

He wondered if they had a committee too. The committee of color names.

He was pretty sure that the eight colors in the crayon boxes he had owned a long time ago hadn’t needed a committee. Those colors just were. They didn’t need to be created and named, they just had to be made into crayons. Red, green, yellow, blue, black, brown, orange, and purple. 

He hadn’t seen purple or orange in a long time, but he didn’t miss them like he missed blue. 

He missed fruit with those colors though. Juicy oranges, just picked off trees, that leaked warm sticky juice down your hands and tasted like sunshine. Sweet, dark purple grapes that you put in your mouth whole, just so they could burst on your tongue. He missed eating fruit. The smell, the taste, the feel of fruit. But he didn’t really miss the colors so much.

Bland walls, bland ceiling, bland floor. So much plain and bland. Flickering florescent behind thick plastic. A hum as the white light brightened and steadied. Tan food on a tan tray. Brown hair, white clothes, nameless skin-colored hands. 

No sky, no sea, no blue.

There was an old woman with gray hair, a yellow dress, and a big white dog that he remembered. She would sit on an old bench in a park full of green. Grass and bushes and trees, all green. The dog had been soft and playful with ice blue eyes. Eyes the color blue that was found in the middle of glaciers. At least he thought that was where it was found. He had never actually seen the middle of a glacier, or any part of a glacier really, so he wasn’t sure. But the dog’s eyes had been such a pale, clear blue surrounded by white fur. It just reminded him of the deepest ice and snow.

He liked summer better. Brilliant sunshine with its golden warmth, sand that people called white but really wasn’t, and the blue sea.

He had gone swimming in that sea. Back and forth across the length of the cove. His cove. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until his arms burned and his legs felt rubbery and could move no more. Then he just stopped and floated. Staring into the never-ending sky, floating in the sea, suspended in an eternity of blue. 

He wanted to be back in that blue. Back in that sea.

He had tried once to pretend. When the others in green had taken the white clothes and brought him to a smaller bland room that had a silver shower head and drain. He had tried to pretend as he stood under the water that he was there again. But that water was not blue, and it just pooled on the bland floor in a clear puddle before disappearing down the silver drain. The others had given him back the white clothes and returned him to the larger bland room with never a glimpse of blue.

He needed the sea. His sea in the cove with the sand that wasn’t white and the endless sky that he could float under forever. 

His blue sea. His blue. Azure.


End file.
